Nora: A Preface.

The paper tears cleanly along the grain, a sound like a card being shuffled. She folds the triangle twice, presses it flat against her tongue, and swallows. The magazine rests open across her thighs, a double-page spread for a Caribbean resort, white sand and a horizon that has been digitally extended. She takes the next piece from the sky.

The waiting room holds four other people. The young man across from her has been staring at a magazine since she sat down, holding it at an angle that catches the fluorescent light and turns his skin the color of old newsprint. The elderly woman with the knitting has not looked up in twenty minutes. The man in the suit reads, actually reads, each page of his newspaper before turning it.

She tears from the margin. The paper is glossy, coated, slightly harder to break down. She works it to the back of her mouth and swallows.

The young man looks up. His eyes find the torn magazine first, then her hands, then her face. She looks back at him. She does not stop. Her fingers find the edge of the next page and she tears, not quickly, not slowly, a continuous motion, and brings it to her mouth without looking away from him. He looks back at his phone. After a moment he shifts his chair three degrees away from her.

She closes the magazine. The pages remaining are thin from what she’s taken from them, the resort spread now a coastline interrupted, a sky with holes. She sets it on the small table at her right and picks up a news weekly from the stack below. She opens to the center. The staples leave two small rust marks on the paper, one on each side of the spine.

She reads the headline. She tears the headline out first.

It occurs to her, not for the first time, that the glossy pages go down easier than the matte. Matte is dryer, takes longer to break down in the throat. Newsprint is almost pleasant. The coated resort stock took considerable work. She notes this without finding it strange. Strange would require contrast with something else, some other version of sitting in a waiting room with a magazine, and she has sat in waiting rooms with magazines for as long as she can remember and she has always done this.

The young man is looking again. She doesn’t acknowledge him this time. She tears a photograph from the article, a close-up of a man in a dark suit behind a bank of microphones, and folds it in quarters and swallows. She did not read the caption.

The sliding window opens.

“She can see you now.”

She stands. The magazine goes back on the stack. She smooths the front of her coat, a habit with no object. In the hallway the doors are numbered in brass. She does not need to check which one. She has been to this particular room before. She taps twice with one knuckle, the way she was asked to, and pushes the door open before anyone tells her to come in.

Two chairs face each other across a low table. The chair on the far side is already occupied.

She sits. She puts her hands in her lap. The woman across from her is watching her the way people watch her, a specific attentiveness she has learned to recognize, the quality of someone who has decided in advance that nothing she does will be a surprise. She finds this more insulting than the alternative.

“How are you today?”

She considers the question. She looks at the yellow legal pad on the table between them.

“Fine,” she says. As fine as the person on the man’s newspaper, the one who took two hundred and fifty million dollars over eight years and was caught by a single piece of paper.